My Recruiting Blog

Local officials are doing their part to help improve economic development and create City of San Antonio jobs.

The San Antonio City Council's Economic and Community Development Committee, the Mayor's Corporate Retention and Recruitment private-sector subcommittee and the business community recently came up with three primary recommendations to help spur economic development throughout the city.

In order to come up with the recommendations, the corporate retention and recruitment subcommittee worked over the past year to acquire information and interview stakeholders in the economic development community, as well as evaluated national economic industry trends and best practices from other cities.

"This is an exciting opportunity to really engage the community in a conversation about what we want San Antonio to be in 10 or 20 years," Mayor Julian Castro said. "We need a strategic plan that not only focuses on attracting new business, but one that places greater attention on retaining the many good corporate citizens we already have in the region."

The recommendations include:

• Create a plan - This includes coordinating economic and community development and creating a systematic approach by developing a regional vision and strategic plan.
• Establish process and structure for economic development - This includes managing economic development regionally; optimizing the economic development delivery system by assigning and promoting functions and roles to community organizations; focusing on the economic development led by officials; improving communication and collaboration by partnering with government entities, chambers, industry and trade groups and community members.
• Improve resource utilization - This includes prioritizing investments to drive strategy, streamlining public sector activities and optimizing investments in external entities.

San Antonio could benefit from the added effort from city officials to improve economic development. Although the city has seen a slight increase in unemployment, it has managed to add some jobs on a monthly basis and the unemployment rate remains well below the national average.

During September, San Antonio saw its unemployment rate increase from 7 percent to 7.1 percent, following a decrease from 7.1 percent during August. Despite the increase, the city's unemployment rate was still lower than the national unemployment rate at the time of 9.8 percent.

San Antonio had a total non-farm employment of 845,800 workers during September, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is up from 844,500 workers during August, but a 1.1 percent decrease from last year.

Labels: City of San Antonio jobs